Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan.

  • Morgan, Michael J.
Date:
1977
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    AFTERWORD: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS [his] tactile experience had prepared [him] for it', but not quite in the way he intended. He seems to mean that touch had never taught him the distinction between response-produced and object-produced movement. I submit that haptic experience ought to have taught him the distinction, and that it was pre¬ cisely for that reason that he initially made mistakes when the normal feedback mechanisms were disturbed. The alternative is that he was innately programmed to make errors. The major conclusion from studies of sensory substitution is that perception is not necessarily to be equated with the input from particular sense organs, still less with inputs along particu¬ lar nerve fibres, as the obsolete law of specific energies pro¬ claimed. Perception is the recognition of certain properties in the input, properties which are important to the organism in its behavioural interactions with the environment. There is not the slightest reason to think that if two sensory messages give the animal exactly the same information, and lead to exactly the same behaviour, they will be perceived differently - even if they come over completely different afferent pathways. Why indeed should an animal have any interest whatsoever in the route by which a message enters its brain? It is as irrelevant to him as a knowledge of the postal service would be to the recipient of a letter. And yet the 'sensationalist' strand of empiricism has obstinately maintained that the way in which we perceive is entirely dependent on the way in which the message enters our brain: so much so, in fact, that there is no way in which to recognize that two messages coming over different pathways signify the same object, short of associating them by trial and error. This particular aspect of empiricism was vyrrong, and Locke's answer to Molyneux's question was mistaken. But the other side to empiricism, its stress upon the importance of experience, may be much nearer the truth. Many of the proper¬ ties of the world as we perceive it are due to our own behaviour: transformations of the retinal image as we move our eyes; hard¬ ness of an object as we squeeze it; changes in sound of an object as we move our head to establish its location. This active aspect of experience was part of what the empiricists, and in particular Condillac, tried very hard to stress. Their conception here was quite the reverse of that version of nativism which conceived all our perceptions to be wired into our brains at birth. 207